Illuminating Letters: Essays on Typography and Literary Interpretation Edited by Paul Gutjahr
and Megan Benton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001
TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction by Megan Benton and Paul Gutjahr
1) The Letter(s) of the Law: Four Centuries of Typography in the King James Bible by Paul Gutjahr
2) Peirs Plouhman [sic], and 'The formidable array of black letter' in the Early Nineteenth Century by Sarah A. Kelen
3) The Autograph Manuscript in Print: Samuel Richardson's Type Font Manipulation in Clarissa by Steven Price
4) "The Italics are Mine": Edgar Allan Poe and the Semiotics of Print by Leon Jackson
5) Typography and Gender: Re-Masculating the Modern Book, 1890-1930 by Megan Benton
6) Perpetua(l) Notion: Typography, Economy, and Losing Nella Larson by Beth McCoy
7) Graphic Text, Graphic Context: Interpreting Custom Fonts and Hands in Contemporary Comics by Eugene P. Kannenberg, Jr.
INTRODUCTION
Reading the InvisibleVirtually from the beginning of his career in 1915, eminent American publisher Alfred A. Knopf placed a colophon on the last page of each book bearing his imprint. This statement informed readers about key elements of the book's making: where it was printed, the paper used, the designer, and particularly the name, origin, and brief characteristics of the type used to print its text. To this day, readers of Knopf books encounter this perhaps mysterious message; most probably pay it little attention or are puzzled by its presence. To many it seems superfluous and self-indulgent. Why then is it there?"Why, indeed?" wondered William A. Dwiggins, Knopf's leading book designer in those early decades. In 1939 he gently scoffed at his friend's colophonic habit. "It's all shop talk," Dwiggins remarked. "He [Knopf] likes 'em. He thinks it gives the books tone, I daresay. I think it doesn't matter a damn one way or the other. All that shop detail is zero. They don't care to know and they don't need to know. Just make your book so it will read handily and let it go at that." (1) Readers, Dwiggins insisted, neither cared about nor benefited from any behind-the-scenes technical details about type, paper, and the like. If handled properly, he implied, typography--the selection and arrangement of type and other visual elements on a page--and especially type itself should be invisible, deferential servants to the text they convey. When type does its job well, all the reader should "see" is the text's message.
The ethic of typographic invisibility has prevailed throughout much of modern Western bookmaking and publishing. The notion was immortalized in a stirring speech by Beatrice Warde in 1932 when she likened good book typography to a crystal goblet. True connoisseurs of wine would prefer crystal to the finest gilded chalice, she declared, because "everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain." So too are text and reader best served by typography that strives to be unseen, she explained. "The mental eye focusses through type and not upon it. . . . The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of 'color,' gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type." (2) Type should be self-effacing and supremely humble; type that intrudes upon a reader's awareness, she warned, was bad: distracting, impudent, visible.
Much has changed since 1932. Although some may still prefer that those who serve others' needs retire into deferential transparency, we know that such "servants" are not invisible. We also know, although we may not have given it much thought, that types are not invisible either. They too have names, faces, personalities, jobs they are good at and others they are not, benefactors and detractors, ancestors and offspring. And thanks to computers, most of us now have at least rudimentary skills in manipulating type to suit our purposes: what sophomore writer has not discovered that an eight-page labor can be stretched to ten with a quick switch to fourteen-point type? With modern word processing and desktop publishing software we make a myriad of typographic decisions each time we produce a text, or we tacitly approve the decisions we allow the software to make for us. But both as writers and as readers, we often fail to notice, much less fully consider, the role of type and typography in making a text not only visible but meaningful.
In fact, too often our own experience at the keyboard leads us to conflate writing and typography, so that the latter seems to disappear as a discrete and independent function. It is an easy and natural confusion, since when creating personal documents--a term paper, a letter, instructions to the babysitter, and so on--writing and typography are virtually synonymous: the form given the text by its writer is the form that the reader receives. In the larger world of professionally published texts, however, the distinction is profound. There a book's content and its form are not created simultaneously by a single person. As a familiar truism in the publishing world reminds us, writers don't write books--they write texts. A book is created when a text is transformed by print, when it is literally shaped into a material object whose visual and tactile features render it perceptible and accessible to others.
For most readers this formal, intermediate presence of print is so familiar and conventional that it is indeed virtually transparent and so unseen and unpondered; we see only text on the page. But it is impossible to read the words on a page without also reading, albeit usually on a subconscious level, the visual text of the page itself. "Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition," writes poet-typographer Robert Bringhurst. Just as we can only hear music by listening to a particular performance of it, we can only read a text by reading a typographic presentation of it. Typography, then, is what Bringhurst calls "an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness." (3)
This is a bold assertion. It interjects typography into an already crowded and contested arena: the complex thing that we call the "text." This leads straight into the thorny question of who or what produces meaning in a text? The author's unique visions and expressions? Transcendent, universal truths? Language itself? Or a typographer's mediating perceptions of some combination of the above, as Bringhurst asserts? Perhaps even the typography itself, an independent kind of visual language in its own right, employed but not finally controlled by a designer's intentions? The essays in this volume contend that type and typography are indeed an intrinsic part of the text that a reader encounters when he or she reads a book.
Scholars have long recognized that a book is much more than simply text. In recent decades a great deal of fruitful thinking and research has revolved around closer scrutiny of "the book" as a constellation of social, cultural, economic, technological, aesthetic, and commercial as well as literary and linguistic forces. Beginning with the 1958 landmark work by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L'Apparition du Livre (translated into English as The Coming of the Book), scholars in a wide range of fields have amply illustrated that there is a great deal to be learned from studying books. Delineating the relatively new interdisciplinary field broadly known as "history of the book" or history of "print culture," these scholars have demonstrated that the study of publishing, printing, authorship, bookselling, and reading constitutes an important dimension of social, intellectual, and cultural history. (4)
Illuminating Letters focuses on one particular aspect of book history, the relationship between a text's typography and its literary interpretation. It is thus grounded in the assertion that both the material form of a text and any interpretation of it are inflected by the historical contexts in which they are made. This general notion that the "materiality" of any cultural object necessarily affects its meaning has been thoroughly articulated in relation to books by D. F. McKenzie in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986), and others have explored and extended its ramifications. Literary critic Jerome McGann, for example, contends that the material and typographic forms of a text, what he calls its "bibliographical codes," together with the commercial layers of its identity--prices, advertisements, distribution channels, and so forth--necessarily and essentially contribute to the meanings of the text, "whether we are aware of such matters when we make our meanings or whether we are not." More recently, George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle have edited The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture (1998), an important volume whose essays illustrate the influence of material form on a text's reception and meanings. As Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, editors of a volume of case studies that showcase this theoretical approach to American literature, argue, there is "no such thing as a text unmediated by its materiality." Accordingly, "the material text [serves] as a nexus in the intersection of literature, culture, and history." (5)
As these scholars have shown, however, the relationship between how and why a book is produced and how and why it is read is often complex, even at times perverse. The meanings made from the text of a printed book derive not only from the many facets that shape how the author, designer, and publisher construct that book but also from the conditions--personal, political, social, and so on--in which the reader encounters it. Highly useful here is the distinction that Michel de Certeau draws between strategies of cultural production and tactics of cultural consumption. (6) Strategies describe the practices of those who create cultural products like texts or books--how they envision, compose, revise, edit, design, package, price, and distribute them. Tactics, on the other hand, describe how those who receive or "consume" these cultural goods in fact use them, understand them, derive meaning and value from them. Strategies of production usually attempt to influence tactics of consumption, and sometimes they succeed, but they certainly do not control them. Users' tactics often sidestep creators' intentions, and sometimes they subvert them. Readers may perceive meanings that neither author nor publisher intended, or they may fail or refuse to conform to expected understandings. This subversive slipperiness is of course partly rooted in the nature of language, but it is also inherent in aspects of a text's materiality, including its typography.
An impressive array of important scholarship has begun to explore this complex network of agency and influence in the creation of textual meaning. French cultural historian Roger Chartier has shown that the material aspects of inexpensive editions known as the Biblioteque bleue--well-known texts peddled for more than two centuries throughout pre-Revolution France--yield important clues suggesting how and why they were both produced and read. By analyzing the typography as well as the content of texts in the margins of early modern English books, Evelyn Tribble "shows that the page can be seen as a territory of contestation upon which issues of political, religious, social, and literary authority are fought." (7) And Claire Badaracco has chronicled the extraordinary care given by the R. R. Donnelley Company's Lakeside Press to the design, illustration, and printing of its heralded "Four American Books." In this project, which culminated in 1930, fine limited editions of Melville's Moby Dick, Thoreau's Walden, Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe were produced in bibliophilic forms both to exalt American literature and to promote the printing firm's bookmaking prowess. (8)
In her study The Visible Word (1994), critic Johanna Drucker distinguishes between two fundamental kinds of typography, resulting in what she calls the marked and unmarked text. A marked text bears highly noticeable typographic features that explicitly, even aggressively, manipulate how the text is read. Varieties of type styles and sizes, selected uses of boldface and color, and so on function prominently to direct the reader's eye and mind, shepherding their understandings of the text. Such typography is typically commercial and bureaucratic; it overtly aims to "sell" a particular message and to provoke a particular behavior from the reader.
Drucker's study focuses on the highly marked typography of early twentieth-century experimental artists who sought to foreground typography itself. This volume, however, primarily looks at the typography of unmarked texts, so-called because it purports to efface its interpretive enterprise. Drucker describes "the even, gray page of prose and poetic convention" as an unmarked, "literary" text because, she contends, it bears no (obvious) marks of typographic manipulation by author, printer, or publisher. Its typography seemingly invisible, its text seems neutral and natural to the reader--and therefore true. The unmarked text ostensibly exudes an "authority which transcends the mere material presence of words on a page." Through its discreet typography the unmarked text is simply "there, and the unmarked author [is] indeed the Author of the Text as pure Word." (9)
We assert, however, that literary texts are no less "marked" by their typography than a more commercial or functional text. Once given visual form, any text is implicitly coded by that form in ways that signal, however subtly, its nature, purpose, and how its creators wish it to be approached and valued. A stage production of Hamlet in modern dress may seem more "marked" than another that adheres scrupulously to conventions of Shakespearean costume, staging, and so on, but it is not. Each feature of both productions represents an interpretive choice made by a director, actor, or stage manager, and is filtered through the physical and verbal skills and qualities of the actors. The words may be Hamlet's, but the uniquely inflected body and voice are Branagh's or Olivier's. The body and the voice make a difference. Type and typography make a difference.
To better understand the role of type in literary interpretation one must examine both the apparent strategies behind its selection and arrangement and the tactics it may provoke or enable in readers' responses. Typography is an interpretive act, but one that must in turn be evaluated: is it insightful, or obtuse? Consonant or dissonant with the linguistic text? "transparent" or obtrusive? To answer that question, the wise reader must look at that which purports to not be there. To perceive typography's interpretive powers we must learn to see and read the invisible.
Can an ordinary reader, untrained in its forms and methods, develop an "eye" for typography as the music lover cultivates an "ear" for detecting a particular musician's performance of a score? Alfred Knopf certainly believed so. We also vigorously contend that yes, ordinary readers can readily learn to see what strives to be transparent. No matter how clear its glass, a window is perfectly visible when one simply alters one's gaze.
This collection is devoted to exploring both the typographic strategies of those who produce books and the interpretive tactics of readers who make sense of a text's presentation. It is important to clarify, however, that none of the included essays focuses on typographic theory or analysis per se. Like Chartier, Tribble, and Badaracco (and many other scholars working in this rich new vein of textual studies), these authors are neither professional book designers nor typographic critics. Rather, they are primarily concerned with literary and cultural meanings. Each author began as we hope our readers may begin, with a curiosity about the particular visual and physical printed forms of a specific text or genre. In each case that curiosity led to a closer inspection of aspects, implications, and consequences of those forms. In other words, each author has made the "invisible" not only visible but illuminating. We hope that these case studies will encourage readers to look in fresh ways at how texts are presented in print, and at how those presentations shape understandings of the text's meanings and value. We believe these essays provide helpful models of that process of discovery and insight.
Because these essays are intended to introduce literary scholars, both experienced and beginning, to the interpretive layers of typography, they neither assume nor require that readers be well versed in typographic terminology, procedures, or theory. Only a very brief and simple introduction to the nature, structure, and evolution of type itself is needed here. Figure 1 illustrates the basic vocabulary for understanding the nonprofessional discussions of type in these essays. References to serifs, for example, indicate the small strokes at the beginning or end of the main strokes of a letter. Type without serifs, which first began to appear in the nineteenth century, is described as sans serif or sanserif. Another important feature of type anatomy is the x-height, or distance between the baseline on which the letters rest and the top of such lowercase letters as a, c, e, m, r, and x. The extensions of other lowercase letters (g, j, p, q, y) below the baseline are called descenders, while the parts of letters (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) that extend above the x-height are called ascenders. The distance from the baseline of one line of type to the baseline of the next is called the leading, because when composing metal type vertical space is adjusted by inserting thin strips of lead between the lines. Type is measured in points; there are approximately 72 points to the inch.
Although the full variety of typefaces has grown exponentially with the advent of digital design and desktop publishing, type used for reading matter--and particularly texts of books--remains a fairly small subset of that larger, dizzying spectrum of style. While there are many systems of classifying and characterizing type, a particularly intelligent and thorough one that focuses on type for text composition is offered by Robert Bringhurst in his highly regarded handbook, The Elements of Typographic Style (1992). Bringhurst relates shifts in fundamental elements of letterforms' shapes--the axis of letters with rounded strokes, or bowls; the presence or shape of serifs; the contrast between thick and thin strokes; and so on--to broader periods of cultural style: renaissance, baroque, neoclassical, romantic, realist, modernist, and the like (see figure 2). (10) This scheme emphasizes the intimate relationship between type and the cultural climates in which it is created and used, a relationship that we too contend is fundamental to any informed understanding of typography.
Written language is of course a vast subject, spanning many cultures and millennia. The parameters of this volume are more manageable: the essays address only printed productions of texts in the English language. They therefore do not directly deal with manuscript traditions that preceded the advent of Western mechanical printing in the mid-fifteenth century, nor with recent electronic editions (although the visual dimensions of each are highly significant and worthy of precisely the kind of study we advocate here).
While these momentous shifts in the technology of textual production make easy boundaries, it is important to note that letterforms and page layout conventions typically blur those boundaries. The earliest types cast by Johann Gutenberg and his associates in Mainz, Germany, in the 1430s and 1440s scrupulously mimicked contemporary medieval letterforms, for example, just as the earliest printed pages were virtually indistinguishable from their handwritten counterparts. The visual qualities of type and typography have steadily evolved to accommodate the limitations of changing bookmaking technologies and to exploit their strengths, but the process has been far more complex than such a formulaic equation suggests. Technology is an essential factor in the history of type and typography, but--as in the history of any cultural product--it is not the only important influence. (11)
The variety of type styles that soon emerged after printing well illustrate this fact. While the technology of typecasting and printing was identical throughout Europe, significantly different types appeared, reflecting national or regional traditions and varying intellectual and political interests. In Germany and northern Europe type resembled dominant scribal letterforms there, those we know today as "gothic" or "blackletter." In Italy, however, types quickly followed the humanist letterforms we now call "roman," letterforms associated with the great scholarly and linguistic discoveries of the Renaissance. By 1500 an alternative letterform developed by Italian Renaissance calligraphy masters was captured in a type style we call "italic." Figures 3, 4, and 5 illustrate these three basic styles, which have remained foremost in Western book production for five hundred years. They quickly came to register broad cultural and ideological as well as nationalist connotations; blackletter, for example, became associated with religious and especially Protestant texts, while roman and italic types prevailed for secular literary and scientific works. (12)
This collection is arranged to amplify two broad themes that resonate throughout the history of printed text production and that guide scholars' approaches to studying it. Although each writer initiated and pursued his or her investigation independently, their efforts coalesce neatly here to reflect a focal dichotomy: the respective roles played by printers and publishers, or by authors, in shaping the typographic presentation of a text.
We begin, however, with an essay that spans the historical scope of the collection, suggesting both a range of ways in which type and typography affect literary interpretation and a larger sense of evolving typographic conventions and innovations. This essay also introduces our overarching contention that by its nature no typography can preserve a "pure" text, the unmediated word of its author. In "The Letter(s) of the Law: Four Centuries of Typography in the King James Bible," Paul Gutjahr argues that while some contend the word of God is immutable, the succession of types used in various editions of the King James Bible undermines that changelessness. Even though the core text of the King James translation has remained little altered since its first appearance in 1611, typographic changes over the centuries reflect the theological, social, and ideological battles that have raged over the bible's production and reception. Those typographic changes, Gutjahr demonstrates, often played a profound role in biblical interpretation.
The next three chapters look in closer detail at the ways in which typographic decisions made by printers and publishers can manipulate, whether deliberately or inadvertently, how a text is received and understood. Each essay examines how printers orchestrate textual meaning through type selection, and at how those choices reveal the ways in which type has been socially and culturally constructed, their features imbued with qualities that reinforce or subvert aspects of--in these three case studies--religious doctrine, gender, and race.
Sarah A. Kelen's "Peirs Plohman [sic] and 'the formidable array of black letter' in the Early Nineteenth Century" discusses the archaizing use of blackletter type in Thomas Dunham Whitaker's 1813 edition of the fourteenth-century allegory Piers Plowman. Whitaker's typographic decision distanced the medieval poem from its nineteenth-century readers iconically, just as his use of Middle English orthography rendered the text historically and linguistically remote. Kelen argues that Whitaker used the archaic blackletter type not out of a simple antiquarian fetishism of the old but to distance the medieval text's Catholicism from his modern, Protestant audience. Whitaker's edition thus manifests an anxiety about the status of Anglo-Catholicism that was prevalent between the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 and the passage of Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
While Kelen explores the religious connotations of type in early nineteenth-century Britain, Megan Benton's essay, "Typography and Gender: Remasculating the Modern Book," challenges us to think about how letterforms gender the reading experience. She notes that the typographic revival of the late nineteenth century, spearheaded by the work of William Morris, Theodore Low De Vinne, and others, was in part a reaction against what they called the feminine look and feel of Victorian machine-made books. The ensuing reform called for a return to preindustrial models of typography, including more "robust" letterforms, and exalted design and publishing practices that, in De Vinne's words, "remasculated" the printed page. In repudiating as feminine, weak, and impoverished the light, thin letterforms favored by most nineteenth-century printers and their customers, reformers implicitly spurned as well the growing predominance of women writers and readers in modern book culture.
Beth McCoy then offers a new way to understand early twentieth-century African American writer Nella Larsen's novel Passing. In "Perpetua(l) Notion: Typography, Economy, and Losing Nella Larsen," McCoy considers the effects of changing the text's type from the Caslon used in the original 1929 edition, published by Knopf, to the Perpetua type used for the novel's popular 1986 edition in the Rutgers University Press American Women Writers series. The latter edition's typography may make it more attractive and hence more inviting to scholars, McCoy contends, but the change also obscures the book's rich commentary on the literature and publishing practices of the Harlem Renaissance that she finds embedded in the original edition's typography. Much of what Larsen wished her book to be about is lost, McCoy argues, when the original Caslon type is replaced in a later edition by another publisher.
By contrast, the final three chapters examine roles played by the other active agent in the creation of typographic meaning, the author. While authors have long been generally relegated to the sidelines by printers and typographers in most commercial publishing practices, savvy writers have often resisted such exclusion, eager to participate in if not control decisions about how their work is presented on paper. As modern technology increasingly empowers writers to create their own typography, it becomes more important than ever to understand how authorial involvement further reveals the dynamic power of type to inflect literary content.
In "The Autograph Manuscript in Print: Samuel Richardson's Type Font Manipulation in Clarissa," Steven Price argues that Richardson's knowledge of type and printing played a pivotal role in how he conceptualized and wrote Clarissa. A master printer as well as one of England's first novelists, Richardson used type to visually build the books' characterization and plot. Most notably, Price explains, Richardson deliberately chose type forms that would give his printed pages certain manuscript characteristics. By evoking those associations, Richardson hoped to lend credibility to his fictional text, which he feared would otherwise be too easily dismissed.
Leon Jackson's essay, "'The Italics Are Mine': Edgar Allan Poe and the Semiotics of Print," explores Poe's frustrations with the printing errors that plagued his texts. Jackson contends that Poe understood acutely the ability of print both to enhance and to undermine a text's power and meanings. While drawn to print by its cultural status and its ability to reach vast audiences, he increasingly felt stymied by a medium that he believed warped his work through typesetting imprecision and carelessness. Poe therefore proposed various ways to circumvent typographic mediation of the literary text; in particular, he sought to use printing methods that bypassed type altogether and so would not distort the meanings he intended for his texts.
Finally, Gene Kannenberg, Jr., takes us into the realm of the American comic book in "Graphic Text, Graphic Context: Interpreting Custom Fonts and Hands in Contemporary Comics." While most readers believe that the visual elements of comics are confined to their graphic images, Kannenberg contends that the letterforms of the texts are also graphic images that similarly convey an author's intended meaning. Furthermore, he considers the influence of technology on interpretive practice by exploring how computerization has radically altered comic book production processes.
In many ways, letterforms are the most immediate and visible link between writer and reader. But letters are neither immediate--without mediation--nor as intellectually visible as one might think. The following essays remind us all that type exerts a powerful role in the interpretive process whether or not that influence is apparent to us. We hope that by helping to make that "invisible" typographic presence visible to the reader's eye, these essays will also help readers understand how a printed text's typographic meaning and literary meaning are essentially intertwined. They may confirm or subvert, clarify or complicate each other, but they cannot finally be disentangled. No one can fully read a text's literary content without also reading its typographic form.
Megan Benton & Paul Gutjahr
Notes
1 William A. Dwiggins, "Twenty Years After" (1939), in Books and Printing: A Treasury for Typophiles, ed. Paul A. Bennett, rev. ed. (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1951), 147.
2 Beatrice Warde, "Printing Should Be Invisible" (1932), in ibid., 109, 113. Original italics.
3 Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, 2d. ed. (Point Roberts, Wash.: Hartley & Marks, 1996), 19.
4 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (1958; London: Verso, 1984). Subsequent seminal work establishing this field includes Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press As an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and several multi-volume national history projects, notably the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 7 vols., ed. D. F. McKenzie, David McKittrick, and Ian Willison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and The History of the Book In America, 5 vols., ed. David Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). For helpful assertions about the nature and direction of this emerging interdisciplinary field, see Robert Darnton's groundbreaking 1982 essay "What Is the History of Books?" reprinted in Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 27-52; John B. Hench, "Toward a History of the Book in America," Publishing Research Quarterly 10 (Fall 1994): 9-21; and Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker, "A New Model for the Study of the Book," in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicholas Barker (London: The British Library, 1993), 5-43.
5 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: The British Library, 1986); Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 12-13, italics in the original; George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle, eds., The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, eds., Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 12. Another important theoretical work germane to these assertions is Gérard Genette's Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (1987; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
6 Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix-xxii. See especially the chapter entitled "Reading As Poaching," 165-76.
7 Roger Chartier, "The Biblioteque bleue and Popular Reading," in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, N. J. Princeton University Press, 1987); Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 2. For studies focusing on more modern texts and authors, see, for example, Jerome McGann's Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
8 Claire Badaracco, American Culture and the Marketplace: R. R. Donnelley's Four American Books Campaign, 1926-1930 (Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 1992). See also Badaracco's larger study, Trading Words: Poetry, Typography, and Illustrated Books in the Modern Literary Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), which examines the strategic roles of typography in serving modern commercial purposes.
9 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 46, 95. For a broader sense of modern theoretical approaches to Western book typography, see, for example, Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, trans. Ruari McLean (1928; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book, ed. Robert Bringhurst (Point Roberts, Wash.: Hartley & Marks, 1991); Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography (1936; Boston: Godine, 1993); Harry Duncan, Doors of Perception (Austin, Texas: W. Thomas Taylor, 1987); Herbert Spencer, Pioneers of Modern Typography, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); and various theoretical discussions in the quarterly journal Visible Language and the irregularly published serials Serif and Matrix.
10 See chapter 7, "Historical Interlude," and prefatory illustrations of these type categories in Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, 119-42, 12-15. For further reading on type itself, see Sebastian Carter, Twentieth-Century Type Designers (London and New York: Taplinger, 1987); Frederic W. Goudy, Typologia: Studies in Type Design and Type Making (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California press, 1940); Ruari McLean, ed., Typographers on Type: An Illustrated Anthology from William Morris to the Present Day (New York: Norton, 1995); and Fine Print on Type: The Best of Fine Print Magazine on Type and Typography (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1988).
11 For a comprehensive introduction to the technical processes of book production since Gutenberg, see Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). See also D.C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York and London: Garland, 1994), 77-151.
12 Of the many excellent studies of the history of types and typography, among the best are Harry Carter, A View of Early Typography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Robin Kinross, Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History (London:Hyphen Press, 1992); Alexander Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface (Boston: Godine, 1990); S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, 4th ed. , rev. John Trevitt (1974; New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Books, 1996); and D. B. Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use, 2d ed. (1922; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937).
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